A VOICE TO PERFORM: ONE OPERA/TWO PLAYS
“Carla Harryman bringing on what’s new, what’s relevant! Clarity of Complexity / Complexity of Clarity”—Rodrigo Toscano
A Voice to Perform by Carla Harryman is a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and an instigation of on-line performance experiments. The video channel celebrates the publication of A Voice to Perform: One Opera/Two Plays, presenting interpretations of Carla’s opera, Gardener of Stars, and her Poets Theater pieces, Memory Play and Hannah Cut In. Each performer selected a segment or several segments of one of the pieces in the book, interpreting these freely, in any way that pleased them and was possible within pandemic circumstances. “The transposition of the text to performance is an occasion for multi-perspectival interpretation rather than faithful expression. Yet, text and performance remain connected as mutual explorations of performance and language,” the author writes in her Notes.
Contributing artists are: Jon Raskin (Sacramento), Michelle Rollman (New Jersey), Billy Mark (Detroit), Rachel Levitsky (Brooklyn), Tania Chen (Brooklyn), and kathryn nowinski, david kuhnlein, and addy malinowski (Detroit).
A Voice to Perform: One Opera/Two Plays is:
Gardener of Stars, an Opera: an exploration of the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire; Memory Play: a multifaceted conceptualization of memory-as-performance; and Hannah Cut In: a piece for speaking voices and manual typewriters derived from the idea of interruption in Hannah Arendt; and text and performance Notes, “My thinking is influenced by structured improvisation in music…”. A Voice to Perform: One Opera/Two Plays is available for purchase here.
A Voice to Perform video channel will be updated with additional interpretations in September 2020. Production by Andrea Sisson. View all the projects here.
Read more from Heidi R. Bean’s Acts of Poetry: American Poets’ Theater and the Politics of Performance
Video Performances of Section of A VOICE TO PERFORM:
A Voice To Perform by Carla Harryman: Kathyrn Nowinski
A Voice To Perform by Carla Harryman: Rachel Levitsky
A Voice To Perform by Carla Harryman: Michelle Rollman
A Voice To Perform by Carla Harryman: Billy Mark
A Voice To Perform by Carla Harryman: Tania Chen
A Voice To Perform by Carla Harryman: Jon Raskin
Saturday, November 3, 2018
S A L O N – LONDON presents Carla Harryman in conversation with Redell Olsen
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster
309 Regent Street London, England, W1B 2HT United Kingdom
Carla Harryman will read from her recent works including Sue in Berlin and Hannah Cut-In. Redell Olsen will be discussing and showing extracts from her recent performance and film works.
see more information here: https://www.salon-london.org/events/2018/10/14/s-a-l-o-n-london-presents
Friday, October 26, 2018
BROADSIDE READING SERIES: FALL 2018
CARLA HARRYMAN and RACHEL LEVITSKY
The Center for Book Arts, NYC
More information here.
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
10th Anniversary of the Joca Seria American Series
ALBERTINE
New York City, NY
This event is co-presented with the Poetry Foundation and the Poetry Association of America.
On Tuesday, October 9, at 6:30pm, we will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Joca Seria American Series.
Join poets Tina Darragh, Marcella Durand, Carla Harryman, Tracie Morris, Eleni Sikelianos and Anne Waldman––as well as translators Vincent Broqua, Olivier Brossard, Marc Chénetier, Abigail Lang, and Béatrice Trotignon––for a bilingual reading of their work.
Saturday, September 22, 2018
Launch for Sue in Berlin by Carla Harryman, with Marcella Durand
at Wendy’s Subway, New York City
Friday, September 7th, 2018
Carla Harryman & Deborah Meadows (with Gray Palmer)
at The Poetic Research Bureau, Los Angeles
August 18-23, 2018
Open Rehearsals and Performance @ LightBox
Detroit, MI
Join Carla Harryman this August for three evenings of performances and two open rehearsals during her residency in Detroit at LIGHT BOX. With musicians Jon Raskin and John Lindberg, performers cris cheek, Mieko Gavia, Audra Kubat, and Billy Mark and guest director Tony Torn, Harryman will present Gardener of Stars, an Opera, Hannah Cut In, and other improvised scores. Set design is by Julia Klein and sound tech by Billy Mark.
Featuring micro electronics, bass, speaking and singing voices, Gardener of Stars, an Opera is an improvised score and radical reimagining of Harryman’s 2001 novel. “More fantasmagoric poem than fictional narrative,” Gardener tracks the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire.
Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s concept of interruption, Hannah Cut In is a work for manual typewriters used as musical instruments and speaking voices. Cut into the noisy sound patterns of the piece are references to Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt and the 1961 television documentation of the Eichmann trials.
Open Rehearsals:
August 18th: 12-6pm
August 19th: 6-9pm
Performances:
August 21st: 7-10pm
August 22nd: 7-10pm (with guest Julie Patton and Paul van Curen performing improvisations based on work by Ron Allen)
August 23rd: 7:30-10:30pm
cris cheek is a documentary performance writer, sound composer and photographer. He worked alongside Bob Cobbing and Bill Griffiths with the Consortium of London Presses in the mid 1970s to run a thriving open access print shop for little press poets. In 1981 he co-founded a collective movement-based performance resource in the east end of London at Chisenhale Dance Space, working with choreographers, musicians and performance artists to make interdisciplinary collaborations. cris taught Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts (1995-2002), played music with Sianed Jones and Philip Jeck, collaborated on site-responsive works about value and recycling with Things Not Worth Keeping and has been a professor at Miami University in Ohio since 2005, currently living in Cincinnati. Most recent publications are the church, the school, the beer (Critical Documents, 2007), part: short life housing (The Gig, 2009) and pickles & jams (BlazeVOX Books, 2017). He podcasts on sound studies in the humanities with Mack Hagood as Phantom Power: sounds about sound.
TANIA CHEN is an experimental musician and free improviser. She plays the piano, found objects, toys, keyboards and electronics. She is a leading interpreter of John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, and Morton Feldman. Tania creates video pieces and compositions that explore the role of performance and sound making.
http://taniachen.com/
MIEKO GAVIA is a writer, actress, and all-around oddball from Indianapolis, Indiana. After graduating from Oberlin College with a degree in Theater, Mieko followed the classic scenario of a small-town girl with big-city dreams and hightailed it to NYC, where she’s been lucky enough to write for publications like Bustle, Efniks and Oxygen, and act in productions like Lou (Lou), The Reenactors (Actress 2), and the Quarter Century:NY web series (Imani). When she’s not acting, writing, or running BRTW, Mieko can be spotted foraging in used bookstores or wherever cheap food abounds.
CARLA HARRYMAN is an innovator in interdisciplinary performance, poetry, and prose. she has authored twenty books including Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlln, a collection of performance writings pubilshed in English and French editions (PURH, 2018); L’Impromptu de Hannah/Hannah Cut In (joca seria, 2018), W— /M— (2013), Adorno’s Noise (2008), Gardener of Stars (2001), and the multi-authored work The Grand Piano, an Experiment in Autobiography: San Francisco, 1975-1980 (Mode D, 2010). Open Box (with Jon Raskin), a CD of music and text performances was released on the Tzadik label in 2012. Her Poets Theatre, interdisciplinary, and bi-lingual performances have been presented nationally and internationally, including at Documenta 13 (2012, Kassel, Germany).
JULIA KLEIN has exhibited her work nationally at venues including Vox Populi (Philadelphia), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Gridspace (Brooklyn), and the Shirley Fitterman Art Center (NYC). In and around Chicago, where she is based, venues include the International Museum of Surgical Science, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Weinberg/Newton Gallery, and Threewalls. Klein received a BFA from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Sculpture from the Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of Art. Since 2009, she has run Soberscove Press, a small nonprofit publishing company that produces art books.
AUDRA KUBAT is a composer, performer, producer, and educator, whose work has earned her a place in the community as a resource for empowerment through songwriting and music. Kubat has released 6 albums to critical acclaim in an award-winning career that spans over 20 years, and emerged as a passionate leader in music education. Her methods of composition articulate grace and uncover hidden places that defy easy categorization. An offering of stark and beautiful reality that possesses experience yet embraces the whimsical. Her activism in the arts has helped her develop strong relationships with community organizations across the region. Currently, she is creating a workshop for the Detroit Institute of Arts, where she will use songwriting as a conduit between visual art and the public. Kubat also works in Detroit Public Schools where she uses music to build new connections to learning. She teaches with Living Arts Detroit, InsideOut Literary Arts Project, and Detroit Institute for Music education.
JOHN LINDBERG has traveled the globe performing thousands of concerts of creative music, in thirty-six countries on five continents. He has released myriad albums — over one hundred – that spotlight his original compositions for a variety of jazz ensembles, and feature his singularly identifiable bass playing. His extended works for chamber ensembles combined with improvising artists have been widely commissioned, including works for The Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, New York Chamber Ensemble, and Neues Kolner Streichquartett. His catalogue contains over one hundred and sixty published works. He is known as an ensemble leader, a collaborator in special duet settings, a solo double bass performer, and as co-founder of the String Trio of New York with Billy Bang and James Emery. His work as a producer of numerous recordings, and of powerful cross-genre projects — such as JazzHopRevolution and BLOB — is well established, as is his ongoing work as an educator with a distinctly unique message. Recent recordings that feature his compositions include the duet with Wadada Leo Smith, Celestial Weather, the duet with cellist Anil Eraslan, Juggling Kukla (released as a limited edition of 300 vinyl LPs), and John Lindberg’s TriPolar,[a]live at Roulette, NYC. Two albums were released simultaneously in September, 2016 on Clean Feed: John Lindberg BC3, Born in an Urban Ruin and John Lindberg Raptor Trio, Western Edges.
BILLY MARK is an experimental artist whose work is rooted in the art of poetic freestyle. Based in poetry, his work extends to areas of music, theater, sculpture, movement and installation. His current work explores the production of improvisational books and other multi-disciplinary long forms of improvisation. A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, his writing has been published in The Guidebook of Alternative Nows and SEEN magazine. His work has been performed at REDCAT (Los Angeles), Spiel Festival (Austria), Detroit Contemporary, and Bushwick Open Studios (New York).
JULIE EZELLE PATTON is a permaculturist, poet, performer, artist, and sculptor. Her poetics take the form of scrolls, extended texts, limited edition work, performances, and site-specific installations. Patton’s performance work emphasizes improvisation, collaboration, and otherworldly chora-graphs, and bridges literary and musical composition. Patton is the author of Teething on Type (1996), A Garden Per Verse (or What Else do You Expect from Dirt?) (1999), Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake (2007), and Using Blue To Get Black (2008), B(Tender Buttons Press, 2015), and Writing With Crooked Ink (Belladonna, 2015). Her work has appeared in ((eco (lang)(uage(reader)) (2010), Critiphoria, I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (2005), and other publications.
JON RASKIN has been a member of Rova Saxophone Quartet for over 35 years exploring the relationship of improvisation and composition, developing and honing the language of ensemble music, and researching linguistic possibilities of the saxophone. He has performed and/or recorded with Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith, Sam Rivers, Tim Berne, Phillip Johnston, Leo Smith and Henry Kaiser. He is, as well, the leader of the Jon Raskin Quartet and a frequent collaborator in interdisciplinary performance.
http://www.jonraskin.com/
TONY TORN is an actor and director based in New York. Tony recently produced the Polyphonic Poetry Festival at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, as well as performing in and directing many of the more than two dozen works of Poets Theater on display. His more than 100 stage and screen credits include “Ubu” in Ubu Sings Ubu (also adapted and co-directed), “Cyclops/Mother” in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus at The Signature Theater, “Rusty Trawler” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Broadway, and multiple shows with legendary experimental theater artists Richard Foreman and Reza Abdoh. He was a founding director of Reverend Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping. He manages Torn Page, a salon space and classroom in Chelsea dedicated to the artistic legacy of his parents, Rip Torn and Geraldine Page.
Open Box, 2012, with Jon Raskin
Composer and improviser Jon Raskin and cross-genre poet Carla Harryman collaborate in bringing together music and poetry, using Harryman’s texts as scores for musical interpretation and speaking voices. Improvisation and a thirty-year period of friendship and sharing ideas have resulted in a recording of four music-text works that animate the contingent connections between music and language. Deploying a range of approaches and musical styles—from the elaborately sound edited, collage improvisations of the long-poem Open Box and the text-based score A Sun and Five Decompositions to the more raucous, heavy metal interpretation of Fish Speech and the art music of Song for Asa—Raskin and Harryman reimagine idioms for instrumental and speaking voice improvisation. The collection includes two instrumental works, derived from memes, that further elaborate the spirit of collaboration in the collection.
Occupying Theodore W. Adorno’s ‘Music and New Music’, 2012.
Carla Harryman retranslates Adorno’s essay as a verbal score for speaking voice and piano improvisation. In collaboration with composer Jon Raskin and pianist Magda Mayas, Harryman performs the lecture freely, tuned to the sounds of twenty-first century, but also recalling those of the twentieth. The re-performance constructs a quiet yet enlivening surface, creating a “noise” informed by cultural and gender difference as well the passing of time and the present historical moment. “I do this,” Harryman writes, “not by constructing an antagonism, but rather by embracing the significance of the lecture/essay as a form and as conversation, one that I have entered and occupied at a singular moment.”
Mirror Play, 2005
Mirror Play has been performed numerous times in the United States, Canada, and in Europe. European productions have been bilingual readings combining English with German, French, and Czech depending on the occasion. It has also been performed as a music text and as a multi-media, cross-genre performance piece. In 2005, the work, directed by Jim Cave, was performed at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Ferndale, Michigan, a few blocks north of 8 Mile Road in Detroit. Actors, musicians, and sound/visual designers from Detroit (Elana Elyce, Walonda Lewis, and Mary Byrnes, actors; John Olson, musician; Mike Peter, sound engineer; Danielle Aubert, designer; Joel Levise and Asa Watten, tech support) and the San Francisco Bay Area (Jim Cave and Roham Shaikhani, actors; Jon Raskin, musician) all contributed. The performance took place in two sets; the following images are from the first, more constructed set, while the second continued to elaborate on its language, gestures, scenes, images, and sounds in a more improvisatory manner. Gallery works by Mona Shahid, Matthew Blake, Mitch Cope, and Shannon Goff (portraits and sculpture by the first two visible in the stills) also became a part of the interpretation of the text and were important elements in the production.
Performing Objects, 2008
“Performing Objects Station in the Sub World,” observes as language event the fluidity between public and psychological spaces as it also obscures normative delineations and familiar narratives about urban and suburban social spaces with non-narrative language games, lyrics, altered memories, and fantasy. The play deploys language that represents or suggests particular but not entirely classifiable relationships to social space: as mentioned above, it moves through sequence of contemplative interior psychic spaces and it also moves through aesthetic modalities—abstraction, expressionism, symbolism, and documentary—as it attempts to unsettle containing narratives about topics such as race and childhood that are often used to control and normalize human relations to social space. The language activity of the play as it bypasses, avoids, and exceeds containing social narratives, brings forth and constitutes the “Sub World…”